


Batteries Not Included

by kmo



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Female Solo, Masturbation, Sex Toys, Unresolved Sexual Tension, dildo and octopus porn fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-30
Updated: 2015-12-30
Packaged: 2018-05-10 08:23:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5578369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kmo/pseuds/kmo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I gave you a vibrator and you got me octopus porn—there’s an O. Henry story in there somewhere, Scully, I’m sure.”</p><p>Set after "How the Ghosts Stole Christmas." Inspired by the filthy headcanons of the incomparable Gillian Anderson.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Batteries Not Included

**Author's Note:**

> "How the Ghosts Stole Christmas" is among my favorite episodes, and well, I couldn't resist Gillian's fanfic prompt in the form of twitter fuckery. I had a surprising amount of feelings about it.

“You open first,” Scully says, uncharacteristically impish. She can’t wait to see the expression on Mulder’s face. She’s got him good this time.

Mulder shakes the red and green wrapped gift. He holds it up to his forehead as if to look through the wrapping paper with his third eye. “I’m sensing something…plastic. A rectangular box that shows moving pictures when placed inside an even larger rectangular box.”

Scully nudges him. “Just open it.”

Mulder tears off the paper with childish enthusiasm. His eyes go wide when he spies the image on the front cover of the VHS tape. “It’s an octopus pleasuring a lady.” He swallows and she swears his deep voice climbs an octave higher than normal. “I can’t read the kanji, but it looks like you gave me octopus porn for Christmas, Scully.”

“I thought you might want to internationalize your collection.” Scully laughs, unable to restrain a small giggle. “Bill’s neighbor was having a yard sale. He’d spent a few years stationed in Okinawa.”

“And you immediately thought of me. I’m touched.”

She’s relieved to find he’s taking it in good humor. “It’s just a gag gift, Mulder.”

“Of course,” he says. “Though it does make me feel a little better about what I got you.” He elbows her playfully in the ribs. “Go on, Scully, it’s your turn.”

Something about the way he says it makes the bottom fall out of her stomach. She’s suddenly both nervous and curious about the long cylindrical gift in her hands. She shakes it and she can hear something thick and solid shift around inside the packaging. “What is it, Mulder? A snake in the can?”

“Not exactly,” he replies, poker-faced.

Scully nicks the ends of the wrapping with her fingernail and slides the paper off her gift. When she sees what Mulder has bought her for Christmas, she can’t keep her mouth from gaping open in surprise. There, tightly sealed in its factory packaging, is a bright cerulean blue seven and a half inch dildo. Scully swallows thickly. She decides to brush it off; she’s had brothers and years of being the only woman in the room—she knows how to be one of the guys. “Is this your way of telling me to go fuck myself, Mulder?”

Mulder chuckles, obviously pleased with himself. “I’d never be so crude. Besides, it’s not just any dildo, Scully, it’s a Rabbit.” He makes little bunny ears behind his head.

Scully examines her gift more closely. Sure enough, the dildo has some kind of attachment shaped like rabbit ears, apparently designed to vibrate against the clitoris. _Her_ clitoris. “I see,” she says, stone-faced.

“It came free when I renewed my subscription to the Playboy Channel,” he says with a shrug. “I thought the blue matched your eyes. And well, as the packaging advertises, the Rabbit is something no woman of the 90s should be without.”

“Right,” she says carefully. Scully knows turnabout is fair play and Mulder’s gift to her is no different than her gift to him, but she feels hot with embarrassment at having the teasing be at her own expense.

Mulder notices her discomfort and says, “It’s just a gag gift, Scully.”

“Of course. Though as a medical doctor I can understand the appeal of the Rabbit, the octopus porn honestly confounds me.”

“It’s called _hentai_ , Scully, and it has a long tradition in Japanese culture. There are early _ukiyo-e_ woodblock prints featuring similar images.”

Of course Mulder would be well versed in even the most obscure sexual subcultures. “It still doesn’t explain why someone would be into human-octopus sex.”

Mulder goes quiet and thoughtful for a moment then says, “Well, the bestiality aspect aside, I’d say the idea of having sex with a partner with eight prehensile limbs, capable of filling multiple orifices at the same time, would be highly arousing to a lot of people. It appeals to our hard-wired sense of polymorphous perversity.” He taps the Rabbit vibrator on its hard shiny plastic case. “It’s actually not that different from what’s going on here in theory.”

One could always count on Mulder to make even the most outlandish smut seem not only plausible, but erotic. Scully looks at the Rabbit again and its promise of “dual-action vibration” and “double stimulation.” Heat creeps into her cheeks. She presses her thighs together which only makes her growing arousal worse. “I should get going. I’m supposed to be at my mom’s in an hour and I haven’t even finished all my wrapping.”

Mulder smiles but there is a fraction of disappointment in his eyes, as if he can’t stand to see her leave. “I gave you a vibrator and you got me octopus porn—there’s an O. Henry story in there somewhere, Scully, I’m sure.”

They get up off the couch and he follows her to the door, ending what had been a strange evening in an even stranger hug.

“I’m sure mom could set one more plate at the table if you wanted to join us.”

“Nah, Scully. I’m good. And hey, I’ve got a movie to watch and everything.” He waves the VHS tape at her. “Oh, and one more thing.”

“What?”

“Your present—batteries not included. Sorry.”

She’s very tempted to slug him in the arm, but remembers she’s already done that tonight. She settles for an intense roll of the eyes. “Merry Christmas, Mulder. See you in a few days.”

***

Scully had taken a few extra days off to be with her family, but her time with them had left her wishing she could take a vacation from her vacation. What with Bill giving her a hard time for showing up late to open presents on Christmas morning (the kids had started without her) and then fighting the crowds at the mall with her mother to return a sweater that didn’t fit, Scully found herself half-wishing Mulder would call and tell her he needed her on an X-File involving a reindeer with a mysterious glowing red nose.

She loves her family, but they are best in small doses. After fighting traffic both ways on the Beltway to drive Bill and Tara to Reagan, Scully is happy to return to the coziness and quiet of her apartment.

She collapses on the sofa, cringing at the thought of work in the morning and the stress-induced headache threatening to blossom behind her eyes. She needs a soothing cup of tea. A massage would be nice, too. Or a good fuck.

The thought pops in her head unbidden and her eyes snap open. Her gazes rests on the shopping bag where she had hastily stashed Mulder’s gift. For a moment she’s tempted to rip open the plastic packaging and try it out. Oh, she’d heard about the Rabbit before—she remembers a woman raving about it at her old med school roommate’s bachelorette party last summer.

_“Orgasms—of the multiple variety. Better living through technology, am I right, girls?”_

Scully had laughed nervously along with the others, but had thought the woman a little crude. She’d never owned a vibrator. She’s not prudish, she tells herself, just old-fashioned—her fingers work just fine. And sure, she’d considered it, but the thought of just walking into one of those “adult” stores, filled with skeevy men…watching her buy it....

Skeevy men like Mulder.

As nice as it would be to be filled with something other than her own two fingers for a change, Scully can’t imagine facing Mulder the next morning after having tried out his present. She won’t give him the satisfaction of knowing her curiosity (and libido) got the best of her.

Scully gets off the couch and takes a few aspirin, chasing them with a cup of warm chamomile tea. She shoves the bag with Mulder’s gift into the back of her closet, but all through the night she’s hyper-aware of where it is—the tiny pea frustrating her under layers of self-control and rationalization.

***

Her first day back after the holidays has her and Mulder confined to a day-long professional development seminar that ought to number among the circles of Dante’s Inferno. The morning session is devoted to a reorganization of the VICAP database that’s about as entertaining as watching paint dry. Scully spends the session seated next to Mulder in the back of the room; she absently takes notes as he doodles aliens in the margins of his yellow legal pad. His trouser-covered leg is pressed against the sheer of her pantyhose for the better part of two hours, but neither makes an attempt to move. They’ve been doing this lately, dancing right up to the edge, but going no further, pushing the envelope farther and farther. It’s a silent dare for one of them to call the other’s bluff, but no one ever does.

Scully pretends interest, her head turned away from Mulder, all the while fantasizing about him taking her from behind, bent over the desk in their office. Or unzipping his fly and straddling him, riding him out until she’s had her fill. There was a time she would have thought sexually fantasizing about her partner to be completely inappropriate, but that ship had sailed for her long ago and this was a _very_ boring seminar.

At 10:45 on the dot, there’s a scheduled coffee break between sessions. Scully gets up to stretch her legs, while Mulder fetches them two cups of government-issued coffee, strong as dishwater.

“Have a good Christmas, Scully?”

“Oh, it was fine. Good to see everyone.”

“Did you try out your present yet?” he asks with an exaggerated waggle of his eyebrows.

“Mulder!” she hisses.

“What? I enjoyed mine. Really broadened my horizons. Thank you, Scully.”

Scully doesn’t know what to say, so instead aims her finest if-looks-could-kill-you’d-be-in-the-morgue death glare squarely in Mulder’s direction.

“Well, if you want to make a formal complaint about it, Scully, Janine from HR is right over there. Though, of course, if you did I might be obligated to mention your decision to gift me with octopus porn this Christmas.”

Scully sighs and decides to ignore him. “What have you got next?”

Mulder fishes the crumpled schedule out of his pocket. “Something about ‘Team of Rivals: Better Collaboration With Local Law Enforcement.’ You?”

“A report on how to submit better field reports.”

“Dee-lightful,” Mulder says, draining his coffee. “Should have played hooky today. Everyone knows the week between Christmas and New Year’s is just a big jerk off.”

Scully blushes, ears turning pink at Mulder’s turn of phrase. Big things being jerked off was not the visual image she needed at 10:45am on a Monday.

***

Scully hadn’t seen Mulder for the rest of the day, which was fine, because the combination of enforced proximity and tedious presentations was doing nothing to discourage the lustful scenarios playing out behind her own eyelids, like something from one of Mulder’s favorite tapes. _Not_ the octopus porn—she still didn’t get the appeal of that.

She went straight home after work, both pleased and oddly saddened to find what a ghost town DC could be the last week of the year. Capitol Hill might be closed for business, but the FB of I didn’t take a holiday break. There would be no boring seminars tomorrow, but there would be Mulder in the basement office, or the two of them on the road, chasing the paranormal from sea to shining sea.

Her back aches and her jaw clenches and what she wouldn’t give for a massage. Or a really mind-blowing orgasm.

The shopping bag in her closet and the toy stashed inside has been calling her name all day. The more she tried _not_ to think of Mulder’s gift, the more she thought of it. And the more she thought of it, the hornier she got, with no relief in sight.

One didn’t have to be Freud to understand that both their gifts had revealed a desire to get the other off, a desire so glaringly obvious it couldn’t even be called subconscious. She couldn’t shake the thought that he _wanted_ her to use it—it was no gag gift, no matter what he had said. And it’s not like Mulder hadn’t already enjoyed _her_ gift, she rationalizes. She doubts his enjoyment was strictly intellectual in nature.

Decisively, Scully marches into the bedroom and finds the bright blue Rabbit, freeing it from its plastic packaging before she can change her mind. There are buttons, she notices now, a lot of buttons, some to control the shaft and the rest to control the rabbit-eared attachment and a big round one marked “rotation.” She presses the power but nothing happens; batteries not included, she forgot.

The Rabbit requires four AA’s. Scully doesn’t know much about vibrators but that seems like an awful lot of horsepower for such a small device. Unable to find any spare batteries around the house and unwilling to make a trip to the store for fear she’ll lose her nerve, she robs the batteries from her TV and VCR remotes to power the Rabbit. The shaft is made of a spongy, jelly material; it’s harder than the real thing, but not so hard as to be unpleasant. There’s a band near the base of the shaft that is filled with tiny pearl-shaped beads that she is sure were not designed to be merely decorative. Nervously, she presses the lowest setting and the Rabbit jerks to life in her hands, vibrating on a low hum. It feels good on her hands and will feel even better inside her. She chokes back a soft moan and shuts it off.

Scully sets aside the vibrator on her nightstand and begins to peel off her skirt and blouse, dropping them on the floor in her impatience. She strips off her underwear but leaves on her bra—for some reason getting into bed completely naked with the Rabbit just feels too intimate. She slips between the sheets and relishes in the satiny feel of the fine cotton against her naked skin, so much more sensual than getting into bed in her pajamas. It feels wanton and dirty and she likes it.

She picks up the Rabbit again and wonders how to proceed. She doesn’t have lube—it had been years since she’d had a reason to buy any. She slides the vibrator against her vulva with the power off, wetting it with her own juices, getting it nice and slick. She turns the motor of the shaft on the lowest setting and uses it to tease her thighs and swollen labia—it feels so good and she wants more. She slips it inside of her with a moan, hips thrusting forward to meet it. She moves it slowly, in and out, testing and teasing, and it doesn’t feel like a real dick but it’s so much better than her own tiny fingers.

She moans again, wondering why she’s waited so long to try this. Billy Joel was right: Catholic girls start much too late.

Licking her lips, she increases the vibration on the shaft to the third highest setting and then flicks on the button controlling the rabbit ears. It hums tantalizingly, just millimeters away from the spot where she needs it to be. Scully plunges the vibrator in deeper; when the attachment touches her clit, it leaves her trembling with the foreshocks of orgasm. It’s intense, almost too intense, and she’s never been so close to coming so quickly before.

There’s only one button left to try. Scully waits for her arousal to plateau then pushes the big round button in the middle of the control panel. The thick band of pearl beads near the base of the shaft starts to circle against her entrance. The beads shift against one another, stimulating the sensitive nerve endings there, turning inside of her in a way that feels so good and so real and like nothing any man could ever give her.

She’s being stimulated inside and out in all of her most sensitive places. It’s too much to hold back and before she knows it, the vibrations have pushed her to the edge of orgasm and then over, crashing fast. She spasms hard around the shaft of the Rabbit, letting out a loud cry that she’s unable to hold back.

Scully comes down from the high, switches the motors to their lowest setting. She’s come, but doesn’t feel finished yet. This is unusual for her—she’d never been able to have more than one orgasm at a time. But the Rabbit has her wet and excited and ready to go again. Scully presses the buttons, increasing the intensity on both the shaft and the ears until they are both at their highest settings. Her whole lower body is shaking. For good measure, she adds the rotation to the mix and it sets her toes curling. She lies back, clenching the vibrator between her thighs, and removes her hands to fondle and pinch her nipples. She closes her eyes and lets her imagination run wild. It’s Mulder’s dick inside of her, rocking against her, twisting and thrusting. His lips and tongue flicking against her aching clit and his knuckle brushing up provocatively against her anus. His fingers tweaking her nipples and his hands pinning her down and spreading her open, until she has no choice but to lie back and take all the pleasure he wants to give her. God, what she wouldn’t give for an eight-armed Mulder here right now.

She comes again for what feels like a full minute, so hard she swears she momentarily blacks out. Exhausted, she turns off the vibrator and rolls over on her side, satiated and spent.

Without a doubt, it’s the best Christmas present she’s ever received.

_A few days later_

She’s in the kitchen fixing drinks—hot toddies for both of them to go with the vintage atmosphere of the film. “I can’t believe you’ve never seen _The Thin Man_ , Mulder.”

Mulder is already seated on the couch. He jams the power button on the remote over and over with his thumb. “At this rate, I’m not going to see it. It seems like your TV remote is broken, Scully. And your VCR.” Before she can stop him, he flips over the remote and removes the backing. “Because you haven’t got any batteries in them.”

It dawns on him at the same time it dawns on her that she’s been busted. Her face goes white as a sheet and she nearly drops their drinks.

Mulder’s face breaks out into a slow, shit-eating grin. “Batteries not included, huh, Scully?”

“I plead the fifth, Mulder,” she says primly, folding her arms, daring him to say another word.

For a moment he just stares at her, almost with new eyes. She wonders if this is the moment where they have at last put too much pressure on the boundaries of their relationship and it shatters. But whatever is holding them back proves stronger than Teflon and surprisingly elastic. Mulder just stuffs his hands in his pockets, almost boyishly, and says, “Maybe we should go out tonight for a movie, what do you say?”

The apartment has become too small and the tension between them too taught; Mulder’s suggestion is a relief. “Sure, it would be nice to get out of the house. We can head down to the multiplex and see what’s playing.”

Mulder tugs on his coat while she bundles herself up and takes a swig of the hot toddy for good measure.

“And maybe on the way, we can stop at the drugstore. So you can get some batteries. A value pack,” he says, mock-innocently.

This time she really does punch him in the arm. Hard.


End file.
